The epiphany came to me last night at 4 o’clock in the morning.  I had a restless sleep for many reasons including knowing that the first part of the blog was not yet developed, and I didn’t yet have a clue what Part 2 is all about.  I do know it’s something to do with the human condition.

The exploration really began when I started to take in the words of Joseph Campbell in his book, “The Power of Myth”.  His language based on Jung’s archetypes led me to the Carol S. Pearson’s book, “The Hero Within”.  I finally finished the chapter on the Martyr archetype, and it was the one chapter I was avoiding.  I had a resistance to this archetype because it screamed “Mother!” to me.  I don’t think I need to explain, but I will say that I’m not a mother so I wouldn’t fully know the self-sacrifice that mothers do for the love of their off-springs.  However, I am aware of my repulsion towards the needless sacrifice when it hurts the person who gives so much of themself.  The words, “I don’t want to be part of it” are conjured up from my whole being.

I read through the chapter as though I was watching a horror movie, like the first time I saw “The Exorcist”.  I would squeeze my eyes shut and cover my ears during parts of the movie I couldn’t stomach in.  I didn’t want to absorb any of it at any level.  But I knew that I already had done this when my reaction was to run away and pretend it does not exist.  It does exist, otherwise I wouldn’t have built this resistance to it.

So I faced the words and my legs were trudging through the tar sands.  “Ahh, this is soooo painfully slow.”  It took me longer than it should have to finish the chapter as I found “necessary” distractions (food, coffee, walk the dog, organize my desk…)  Eventually I finished and was rewarded (though I didn’t expect that at all.)  I did not know this chapter would have the answer, or part of it, in my quest to understand the human condition of death.

“The  Wanderer, The Warrior, and the Magician learn increasingly sophisticated lessons about ways to control theri lives and destinies.  Ironically, it is only when this control is achieved that the hero can let it go and learn the final lesson of martydom – the acceptance of mortality.  Death is basic to nature.  The leaves fall of the tree every autumn and make possible spring blossoms.  All animal life, including humans, lives by eating other life forms…  The cosmic dance of birth and death… speaks to us of Eros – passion.  What it requires of us is abandonment of our fears of loss (including our fear of death) into the ecstasy of live and living.” – Carol S. Pearson (“The Hero Within”)

Ultimately she says that the we may reject the “sacrifice philosophy”, but we will discover that we martyr ourselves to our wandering, warrioring and may even our magic-making archetypes until we are more free and fearless in our giving, because it feels less like sacrifice but simply an expression of who we are. 

It was a relief.  I know have a better understanding and acceptance of my mother’s behavior.  She would always  save the best morsel of food on her plate for me.  I want her desperately to enjoy it for herself, and it annoyed me then that she would not allow herself that pleasure.  I could not accept her self-sacrifice.  But now I have a better understanding of her motivation to give without thinkig of herself first.

Back to our hero in “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?”m Deckard’s morale issue is simplified by Rachel when she kills his real live Nubian goat after he sent her away.  She went to his apartment building and un-abashedly pushed the animal to its death over the edge of the building with Deckard’s wife and neighbor witnessing the act.  Upon hearing the news he couldn’t comprehend the useless waste of a precious life.  The duality of giving life and killing life is hard to put to one simple sentence in my own words, so I can only repeat:  “Life Beget Life” and “Life Feeds on Life”.

I won’t give the rest of the novel’s story, in case you’re interested in reading the book.  The ending is different from teh movie.  It was written by Philip Dick, and it’s the novel that inspired the movie, “Blade Runner” which I fell in love with the first time I watched it.  I’ve always wanted to read the book, and it came to me without looking for it when someone had left a bagful of books for donation at the frontdoor of my former apartment building in Hollywood.  (I am a believer of synchronicity.)

As an example, I really did not expect to find an answer to my exploration to one aspect of the human condition.  It is infinite, and I’m so glad of that.

I am exploring an idea so I’m breaking it into two parts. 

Empathy towards the androids?  Rick Deckard, the hero in the novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, faces the dilemma of having to choose between killing or not killing the renegade androids required of his job as a bounty hunter.  If he continues on his mission then to be effective he decides that he would need the help of the only android available to him who knows the inner workings of the android mentality.  Her name is Rachel Rosen, and she is the prototype android that was created for the pleasure of the colonists inhabiting the other planets.  Unavoidably, he’s discovered he’s attracted to her beyond her professional qualifications.  Another effective bounty hunter sees Deckard’s problem, and tells him to sleep with her then kill her.

Killing is against his philosophy to respect all living things, and though androids are living they do not qualify as human beings or an animal.  He has managed thus far in his career to keep the organization of an organic living entity separate from the non-organic living entity.  But the lines begin to blur, especially since he’s been acting as a caretaker of an electric sheep.  Everyone dreams of owning a real animal.  Most animals and insects have become extinct since the fallout of the dust.  Owning a fake, though, very real-looking sheep “sapped his morale”.  

His assignment to kill the renegade androids who escaped from a colony in Mars will reward him with $1,000.00 per kill, and he’ll be able to afford something real if can “retire” the 6 androids who came to Earth.  They had escape a life of servitude to the emigrants of the colony, for which thet were created of toiling for the human beings.  But neither their creators nor the androids expected an evolutionary possibility/probability the androids would develop a sense of individuation – a self-governing entity with its own purpose. 

 As Deckard knocks off 3 of the six remaining androids in his list, he begins to doubt his ability to kill the last 3 androids.  In desperation to finish the job and fully own a real animal he calls the “Rachel Rosen” prototype and they sleeps with her.  After having sex with her he aims his laser tube to kill her.  She is, by design, cooperative and instructs him to do it painlessly by pointing him to the exact spot to aim.  He aims, but he can’t fire, and sends her away.  “I’m not going to kill you.”  The hero straddles the worlds of his analytical self and his empathic self.

Empathy, as one android suspects is the quality that differentiates herself from the human being.  She orders another android to experiment with cutting off the legs of a spider to see if it can still walk with only 6 legs instead of 8.  The other android uses a pair of cuticle scissors and dutifully cuts off 4 legs.  Isidore, a servile and grateful human being, nicknamed as “Chickenhead” (because of his low IQ) befriends the remaining renegades.  Considered a “special” he is treated with painful pity by society, given only a menial job to serve the community.  He is constantly aware of his burden.  He presents the spider, as a gift, to the droids; but witnesses the cruelty and inhumane torture the spider is subjected to.  Unable to withstand the torture any further, he takes the spider and drowns it in the kitchen sink.  The androids look on with fascination only.

In the last 24 hours I’ve been thinking about “The Human Condition”.  I thought I would paint the words in big bold letters on the wall opposite my desk.  It would be a reminder of the frail human condition.  What is it about seeing a life unfold, like the uncurling of a petals of a flower to its fullness, and it permeates your senses with its fragrance and its heart-breaking beauty?  It’s a wonder.  And knowing at the same time that at its peak it is also quickly receding to its death, each molecule decomposing to its basic building elements that all organic and inorganic matter is made of.  I somehow begin to know the meaning of the expression “Life begets life.” 

It’s complicated beyond words.  I think I had to reach a certain age, or experience life to a certain breadth and depth to begin to grasp its profoundness.  I’ve seen hints of it in the poetry of the lyrics of the band “Tool”.  Their version of it is “Life Feeds On Life.”

 Here’s a link to the song on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luSJiBjqz_s

The lyrics below with credits go to Tool.

Life Feeds On Life

And the angel of the Lord came unto me,

Snatching me up from my

Place of slumber,

And took me on high,

And higher still until we

Moved in the spaces betwixt the air itself.

And he bore me unto a

Vast farmland of our own midwest,

And as we descended cries of

Impending doom rose from the soil.

One thousand, nay, a million

Voices full of fear.

And terror possessed me then.

And I begged,

 

“Angel of the Lord, what are these tortured screams?”

And the angel said unto me,

“These are the cries of the carrots,

The cries of the carrots.

You see, reverend Maynard, tomorrow is harvest day

And to them it is the holocaust.”

And I sprang from my slumber drenched in sweat

Like the tears of one millions terrified brothers

And roared,

“Hear me now,

I have seen the light,

They have a consciousness,

They have a life,

They have a soul.

Damn you!

Let the rabbits wear glasses,

Save our brothers…can I get an amen?

Can I get a hallelujah? thank you, Jesus.

 

Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on…

This is necessary

 

It was daylight when you woke up in your ditch.

You looked up at your sky.

That made blue be your color.

You had your knife with you there too.

When you stood up there was goo all over your clothes.

Your hands were sticky.

You wiped them on your grass,

So now your color was green.

Oh Lord, why did everything always have

To keep changing like this?

You were already getting nervous again.

Your head hurt and it rang when you stood up.

Your head was almost empty.

It always hurt you when you woke up like this.

You crawled up out of your ditch unto your gravel road

And you began to walk

And waited for the rest of your mind to come back to you.

You could see the car parked far down the road

And you walked toward it.

If God is our father, you thought,

Then Satan must be our cousin.

Why didn’t anyone else understand these important things?

When you got to your car,

You tried all the doors,

But they were locked.

It was a red car and it was new.

There was an expensive leather camera case lying on the seat.

Out across your field

You could see two tiny people walking by your woods.

You began to walk towards them.

Now red was your color and of course,

Those little people out there were yours too.

The day before New Year’s Day I discovered one of my neighbors had cut down a very old rubber tree.  This tree was majestic, and its wide girth supported big boughs and its leaves provided a welcoming shade from the sun when I walk my dog from one end of Orange Grove to Olympic Blvd.  In my grief, I picked up the remnants – a chunk of wood and two leaves and saved them as a remembrance of that beautiful old thing.

On that same weekend I had tucked into a book called “The Hero Within”, by Carol S. Pearson.  The book is about the 6 archetypes that we live by, and she identifies them as the Innocent, the Orphan, the Wanderer, the Martyr, the Warrior and the Magician.  The book is helpful for stepping outside of the trees and getting a bird’s eye view of the forest of the story.  It shows how the personal is universal in its use of the archetypes to describe the hero’s journey. 

The Innocent and the Orphan, she considers, to be the pre-heroic phase. When the Innocent transforms to the Orphan, the character moves from a place of seeing the world as the Garden of Eden that provides for everything he/she needs to that of the loss of paradise.  The metaphor of the loss of paradise is the loss of innocence which is the awakening to the reality of suffering:  We can’t always get what we want.  (Those words always brings to my mind the Mick Jaggers’ lamenting voice “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes well you might find you might just get what you need.”)  The lyrics of that song is actually apt for the situation of the journey from Innocent to Orphan. 

The Innocent and the Orphan is the setup needed for the character to “grow up” and take responsibility for themselves, before they can journey into the other archetypes and the lessons to be learned from those views.  In the Orphan phase the person has a strong tendency to hide from reality and and not deal with the situation..  To move from denial to acceptance requires an awakening to the betrayal of a lie, an acknowledgement of the pain of the loss of innocence – in essence going through the suffering.

Grief is hard to bear.  It’s frightful to see a raging fire.  That fire is the rage within that dispels the suffering into actions (or lack of) that are unhealthy and keeps the character stuck in that mode of powerlessness.  He/she cannot embark on the journey.  An example would be addictions – whether it’s substance abuse or creating dramas in our lives. 

As writers we are curious about this rage; we want to know what’s feeding that fire?  We have this instinct to expose the rage so that we can shed light on our humanity.  Carolyn Myss said, “Our biology is our biography.”  Human beings are constantly expressing themselves in ways we don’t see on the surface.  They may not be saying, “I’m hurting”, but their body language or the situations they get themselves into certainly display their state of being.  The Orphan archetype grabs on to anything that can alleviate the pain.  The character willingly aligns himself/herselt to a political movement; a philosophy; a religion; therapy – something that they can identify with – even journaling to see their pain and validate it.  It is a form of denial but is a step towards the awareness of the pain.  But to experience transformation, the character needs to be purified by the fire by going through it.  They need to accept the pain and feel it which is essentially the  grieving process.  In this journey, the Orphan becomes part of the greater whole because he/she awakens to the fact “Everyone suffers.”

Have you heard about the Buddhist parable of the mustard seed?  I quite like it.  Here’s one version I found:  http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/btg/btg85.htm.  An excerpt from the link above:

And Kisa Gotami had an only son, and he died. In her grief she carried the dead child to all her neighbors, asking them for medicine, and the people said: “She has lost her senses. The boy is dead. At length Kisa Gotami met a man who replied to her request: “I cannot give thee medicine for thy child, but I know a physician who can.” The girl said: “Pray tell me, sir; who is it?” And the man replied: “Go to Sakyamuni, the Buddha.”

Kisa Gotami repaired to the Buddha and cried: “Lord and Master, give me the medicine that will cure my boy.” The Buddha answered: “I want a handful of mustard-seed.” And when the girl in her joy promised to procure it, the Buddha added: “The mustard-seed must be taken from a house where no one has lost a child, husband, parent, or friend.” Poor Kisa Gotami now went from house to house, and the people pitied her and said: “Here is mustard-seed; take it!” But when she asked Did a son or daughter, a father or mother, die in your family?” They answered her: “Alas the living are few, but the dead are many. Do not remind us of our deepest grief.” And there was no house but some beloved one had died in it.

Kisa Gotami became weary and hopeless, and sat down at the wayside, watching the lights of the city, as they flickered up and were extinguished again. At last the darkness of the night reigned everywhere. And she considered the fate of men, that their lives flicker up and are extinguished. And she thought to herself: “How selfish am I in my grief! Death is common to all; yet in this valley of desolation there is a path that leads him to immortality who has surrendered all selfishness.”

Suffering can be a gift when the hero opens up to accepting the fullness of life.  We are witnesses to it all the time. Watch the transition of a tree through the seasons.  It’s a reminder of the cyclical and linear passage of time that is akin to the movement of the hero through the various archetypes.  We’re in a state of constant contraction and expansion; and each cycle of this is growth like the rings of a trunk of the tree exposed.

First thing I want to express is to say “Thank you.”  I am coming from a place of gratitude that ‘We are here.”  It’s a brand new year, and we’re together and we’re inspired with our list of intentions and aspirations.  Ready, set, go!

Thank you to Jennie and Jim for hosting a very warm and gracious Christmas party at their home.  The spread on the table was full of wholesome, handmade goodies from Jennie’s kitchen, and there was hot mulled cider on the stove to welcome the guests.

 I thought I’d kick off the blog of 2012 with what’s been sitting with me.  After a few relaxed days away from the office, and just busying myself with cleaning and organizing my living space, these words came to me:  “Let go and Let God.”  (No.  This is not going to be a pontificating blog.)  I came upon the phrase from a Wayne Dyer audio book.  (I spent a summer travelling between San FranciscoandLos Angeles, and listened to a lot of audio books.)  The book was his interpretation of the Tao Te Ching.

 “Let go and Let God.”  How does this apply to my work, my purpose, my “I must”?  Okay, here’s one:  Writing would be easy if I could always write from a place of inspiration.

 This is not an easy thing for me to do, because a typical day is full distractions, and the “other” work that I do to survive.  The interesting twist is the work that I do to survive is really the writing.  If I couldn’t write then I would wither inside.  The first letter of Maria Rilke to the young poet Hans Kapus is to give the advice to seek from within for his “I must”.

 “…my dear sir, I know no advice for you have this:  to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise, at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.  Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it.  Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist.  Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside.  For this creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in Nature to who he has attached himself.” – From “Letters To A Young Poet” (translation by M.D. Herter Norton).

 When I read Rilke’s words I am reminded of another writer whose story I can relate to, because of the circumstances he wrote many of his works, especially that of “Gulag Archipelago”.  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about the labour and concentration camp as a prisoner within the barbed wires of the camp.  He wrote the book in the midst of a wasteland, where there was little, if not any, resources available to sustain a human being.  If that does not inspire anyone to create regardless of whatever circumstances he/she is mired in then perhaps being an artist is not their true calling.  It must be strong force from within, that is as basic as breathing air, but is conscious and needs homage with action.

 I relate to Solzhenitsyn’s story because on another level I live in a wasteland of the belief that I need to be inspired to write.  This is not always possible when balancing the spinning plates of the survival work, the “I must” work, and taking the time to be in a quiet place.  That quiet place can be a meditative space where the sky is constantly blue, the backdrop to the constantly moving clouds.  The clouds are like my passing thoughts that I have the tendency to attach meanings to, and sometimes obsess about.  I mistake them to be the “I must”.  I must buy this.  I must get that.  I should call my mother, or I must do laundry… and the list goes on.

 The “I must” could just be that stillness to let the inspiration to flow through me, and to be part of the flow to create.  And if I’m still long enough an opening begins that I’m not so focused on the distractions.  They are still there, but my attention has shifted to the source of a light that reveals a truth.  That truth needs expression without judgment.  Say it as it is.  To let go without judging if it is good or bad, but accepting it for what it is.  Then to trust the creation, because its source comes from a very deep place that I and everyone else taps into – the source which is like the aquifers that sustains life on this planet. 

 The cool thing about LAFPI’s blog practice is we are a community of trust.  Bloggers are not asked to run their work through our editor.  The implicit trust is born from knowing we’re all coming from the same place – respect each others’ contribution that is unique and worthwhile.  We want to nudge and tickle something out of each other to bring forth aliveness in our quest for creativity. 

 I had some reservations about the first to write the blog for 2012.  Wow, I thought… I have to say something good.  Pshaw…Are you kidding Analyn?  Just be yourself.  It will be what it is.  As long as speaks from the heart then I’ve done my work.

Katori Hall, whose two hander, The Mountaintop, opened October the 13th at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, has had an amazing and serendipitous ride to Broadway.

The thirty year old playwright, who has also acted and worked as a journalist, has a resume filled with accomplishments and awards. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, she did her undergraduate work at Columbia University, received a M.F.A. in Acting from Harvard University and studied with Christopher Durang at Julliard. She won the Fellowship of Southern Writers Bryan Family Award in Drama, the New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in Playwrighting and Screenwriting, a Royal Court Theatre Residency,  and the Lorraine Hansberry Playwrighting Award. She was also a part of the Cherry Lane’s mentor program where she was mentored by Lynn Nottage.

However, when she finished The Mountaintop in 2007, she couldn’t get it produced. The play takes place on April 3, 1968 in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, just after Dr. King’s has delivered his famous “mountaintop” speech, and the night before he was shot dead on the balcony of that room. It portrays Dr. King as a man with flaws and doubts, who sniffs his socks and is dying for a Pall Mall. The maid, who is not who she seems, becomes his confidante. In an interview with Patrick Pacheco in the L.A. Times, Hall said, “I wanted to present a man who achieved greatness but who was really quite ordinary because when a person is presented with that, then it means that you, as an ordinary person, can achieve greatness too.”

American producers didn’t want to take a chance on a play that presented Dr. King as a person, rather than as an icon.

Then, Hall got a little help from a friend. She had acted in a play by British director James Dacre and emailed him the play. He convinced his theater to do it and the play opened in 2009. in Theatre 503, above a pub in London.

The London Paper said, “Director James Dacre’s production is nothing short of magnificent. I won’t reveal the twist, suffice to say you will laugh, cry and possibly leave the theatre a better person.

It then transferred to the West End and was the surprise winner of the 2010 Olivier Award for Best New Play.

Here comes the truly serendipitous moment. A Canadian independent producer, Marla Rubin, saw the opening night performance of the play at Theatre 503 and thought it was amazing. She brought in an American producer, Jean Doumanian, and they began to put it together for Broadway, which demands stars. They cast Samuel L. Jackson, who had been an usher at Dr. King’s funeral, and who had always wanted to play him. Halle Berry was first cast as Camae, but had to drop out and Angela Bassett took over.  Branford Marsalis wrote incidental music for the production.

Two and a half years later, The Mountaintop opened on Broadway and is still playing to capacity houses. “It been quite a journey,” says Rubin.

The play closes on January the 22nd but Katori Hall has moved on to her next production. The Signature Theater Company selected her to be part of their first so-called “Residency Five,” which guarantees at least three full productions over the next five years, and her new play, Hurt Village, will run at off-Broadway’s Signature Theatre Company, from February 7 through March 18, 2012, with an official February 27 opening.

In November, ALAP sponsored a panel about the fight for equal opportunities by women playwrights, with writers Jean Colonomos, Kristen Lazarian, Jan O’Connor, and me, moderated by Dan Berkowitz. One of the things we agreed upon was that women playwrights in the theater who make it to the top are the exceptions to the 20% rule.

I wondered who they were and how they made it into the rarified spheres.

Nell Leyshon at the Globe

One of the most rarified must be Shakespeare’s Globe in Stratford On Avon, which commissioned a woman, Nell Leyshon, to write a play for the theater for the first time since 1599. Bedlam, based on the real 18th century Bedlam lunatic asylum, in London, opened at the Globe in 2010, only 411 years after it began.

As the opportunities for women in British theatre don’t seem much different from those in L.A. – only 23% of directors are female and fewer than a fifth of playwrights getting work staged are women – I don’t know if I was more astounded to hear the Globe never had a play written by a woman or that they’d broken down and commissioned one.

However, Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the Globe, seems to be on our side. He’s said: “There was a rather dull masculinity which was in favour in the 1990s. That was the fashion then, but women seem to be coming back in at the moment.” Leyshon says that women are benefiting from the “snowball” effect, and are being spurred on by each other’s success: “When you have women who do it, you get a build-up of self-belief.”

Of writing for the Globe, Leyshon says, “It’s something that had to be done. It’s like losing your virginity.”

I hadn’t heard of Leyshon, who was born in Glastonbury, England, and lives in the county of Dorset. She began writing short stories and novels while studying English at Southampton University and taking care of her first child at the same time. After she graduated, she had another son, took on teaching to pay the bills, and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton.

She didn’t write her first play until she was forty.

When she started writing for theater, Leyshon recalls, people would say, “’She’s a woman writer,’ and I didn’t understand that. You’d never say, ‘She’s a woman novelist’ or, ‘She’s a woman journalist.’ But in theatre, you do.”

Before she began dramatic writing, she had her moments of despair. She says, “I think women often have problems with self-belief, which sounds a bit boring, but they do.” In 2000, she built a bonfire in her garden and burned all her early work.

When she wrote a radio play, she said, “The feeling was electric.” The radio play, which she co-wrote with Stephen McAnena, won the Richard Imison Memorial Award 2003 for the best dramatic work broadcast by a writer new to radio. She now writes regularly for the BBC. Her play Comfort Me With Apples won her the Evening Standard award for most promising playwright. Then her adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now opened in Sheffield in 2007, and transferred to the Lyric Hammersmith in London.

Bedlam got mixed reviews. Edward Glass of Online Review London, was one of the kindest, calling the play “almost worth the wait,” writing that “The whole would have been magnificent, if the author had pushed the boundaries more and the darker moments of the play really had been dark.”

It sounds to me like a marvelous spectacle. From Edward Glass again: “The play is packed with a wonderful rag-bag of humorous drinking songs, both Georgian and later, all complemented with ingenious choreography. The best were the song about a gin bottle (which goes astray in a marital bed) and the cheeky Oyster Nan, about a girl who shuts and opens like an Oyster…Characters sail through the standing audience in a two man gondola, and the bedlamites water the stage causing flowers to pop up from nowhere to the tune of An English Country Garden. The fan dance in the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens (my favourite scene of the play) provided a visual delight.”

I’ve now seen three Shakespeare plays from the Globe at the Broad in Santa Monica, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merry Wives Of Windsor, and A Comedy of Errors, and have been knocked out every time by the quality of the productions. The Broad is bringing over a Globe production every year and I’m hoping that soon, I’ll see a revival of Leyshon’s Bedlam in Santa Monica and more from women playwrights at the Globe to follow.